As medical device feature sets become richer and more complex, medical devices are getting increasingly complicated to program. This is especially the case in situations where modification of one feature ripples through and interacts with other selected features.
For devices such as implantable cardioverter defibrillators it can be very difficult for physicians to deal with non-compatibilities with programming. Such devices may have many features to program and, when physicians go in to program, there may be some inconsistencies that are not allowed by logic or by concerns for safety of the patient. In the past, these inconsistencies were displayed as error messages and the physician often had to wade through a series of screens to determine the nature of the inconsistency and how to resolve it.
In addition, physicians were frustrated by error messages which noted an interaction but did not tell them what to do to resolve the problem. They were often reduced to trial and error programming which might create a second parameter interaction while resolving the first.
What is needed is a more intuitive way for the physician to resolve parameter interactions.